Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(27)

Oberon had quite rightly concluded he couldn’t be a dog in this fight; he was barking and trying to distract the demon but otherwise staying out of range of the scythe.

Like many long weapons, scythes are fearsome if you’re right at the arc of their swing. But they’re slow and cumbersome to wield, and if you can get inside that arc, you have a decent chance to deal a debilitating blow to an ill-guarded opponent.

Back me up, buddy.

I charged the demon and went for a slide tackle that would have made Manchester United proud. I dissolved my camouflage as I moved so that Oberon could see me, but unfortunately the demon also caught this in his peripheral vision. If he was anything like the barker, he probably could have seen through it anyway, but my abrupt pop into view triggered a reflex action. He leapt over my slide and landed astride me, raising the scythe high above his head to harvest my dumb ass. With his eye sockets cast down at me, he didn’t see Oberon coming.

My hound—a buck-fifty and all muscle—hit the demon square in the chest, bowling him over. Oberon’s momentum caused him to trample the demon and keep going, which was just as well, because the reaper rolled and regained his feet with a backward somersault, still holding on to his weapon and facing me.

Well done, Oberon. Stay behind him but don’t charge. He knows you’re back there. Growl and keep him nervous.

The reaper advanced on me, swinging his weapon in a weaving pattern that forced me to backpedal. But once I had the timing of it down, I lunged inside the blade following a backswing and turned my right forearm to block the shaft, continuing to spin around to the left so that I could ram my left elbow into his teeth. Seeing that stagger him, I followed up, shoving the heel of my right palm as hard as I could underneath the reaper’s jaw. The skull, bereft of convenient muscles and tendons to anchor it firmly to the neck and shoulders, popped clean off, and the flames died in the sockets.

<Attaboy, Atticus! Don’t fear the reaper!>

This isn’t done.

I checked on Granuaile. She was breathing heavily and looked exhausted but not wounded.

“You okay?” I asked. She nodded in the affirmative right as a chorus of roars erupted from the far side of the abattoir. The ghouls had just realized I’d killed the reaper, and their rage was answered by a new wave of screams from the carnival goers. A few stragglers had poured in during the fight, and the nightmare set before their suddenly cleared minds was of the brick-shitting sort.

Ghouls are unclean, since they feast on the dead or on bits of the dead and get exposed to all sorts of filth and disease. Conveniently, they’re immune to infection and poison, but wild ones like these weren’t terribly worried about spreading such things around. Their fingernails—which should probably be classified as claws—are coated with all sorts of virulent shit. One scratch would probably spell a death sentence without a source of high-powered antibiotics nearby. Of course, if a ghoul is trying to open you up with its claws, the likelihood of you living long enough to die by disease is small.

Back in Arizona, there was a small group—or I should say a shroud—of ghouls that had learned how to blend in well with the population. They were incredibly handy lads to have around, because they made bodies disappear and cleaned up scenes that would be difficult to explain to local authorities. Most paranormal communities rely upon such shrouds, for obvious reasons—they’re key to keeping humans oblivious and believing that the only predators out there are other humans. Antoine and his boys drove around in a refrigerated truck and were able to pass for human, as long as they didn’t get too hungry and kept their claws trimmed. They were also quite scrupulous about waiting for people to die on their own before eating their bodies.

These ghouls weren’t in Antoine’s class, however. If Antoine’s shroud went to Harvard, this shroud was illiterate. Savage, gray-skinned, black-toothed, and covered in viscera, they looked only too willing to kill their food if the reaper couldn’t do it for them.

“Take the scythe,” I told Granuaile. “I will throw them to you off-balance. Finish them or else get out of the way.”

“Ready,” she puffed, and nodded at me. She looked ready to hurl; the smell of death and sulfur was inescapable. But she could handle the scythe; I’d been training her primarily in the quarterstaff, and she could adapt some of those moves.

I approached the shroud, wagering that since dead bodies rarely fought back, they’d be rather unskilled fighters that depended largely on their strength and claws to win the day. There were eight of them, though, and I doubted they would politely wait their turns to take me on one at a time. The wood flooring that concealed the demons from Amber also cut me off from drawing any more power; I had to fuel everything on what I had left in my bear charm. Perhaps a gambit was in order.

The laws of Druidry tend to frown on binding animated creatures, and it’s impossible to bind synthetics and difficult to mess with iron. But apart from that, anything goes. The flooring wasn’t nailed down—it was simply plywood sheets atop the dirt. I created a binding between the middle of one sheet and the denim jeans of a body halfway up the stack on the far wall. Normally this would make both the jeans and the plywood fly to meet each other, but since the body wearing the jeans was crushed underneath so many others and couldn’t budge, only the plywood was free to move. Once I energized the binding, the plywood flew up and back to the wall and, functioning like a giant bookend, mowed down a couple of ghouls on the way, though without doing them much harm. More important, it left some exposed earth, where I could access more energy.